An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  2

  “Blowin’ in the Wind”

  She had watched them on campus in the fall, secretly fascinated by their intensity: long-haired girls; thin, scraggly-bearded boys in wire-rimmed glasses, wearing black turtleneck sweaters and jeans, fatigue jackets, or battered tweeds. Green Army knapsacks heavy with books flung over their shoulders.

  “Greenbaggers,” Tom and Pete called them. “Baggers” sometimes. They made fun of them when they saw them in the Commons, gathered around one of the big tables arguing about books or politics. Every time they walked past the Students for a Democratic Society’s table in the Union, they grabbed a handful of anti-war pamphlets, tore them up and threw them in the trash.

  “Goddamn pinkos,” they’d say.

  But Jane thought they were more like beatniks. She’d read about beatniks, fantasized about visiting Greenwich Village someday, with its clubs and coffeehouses. Imagining college life, she had thought it might be rather like that and, though she loved the life she had walked into the moment she met Tom, sometimes, walking through the Commons, she peered down the stairs leading to the Kiva, the campus coffeehouse where Baggers hung out, talking, listening to folk music or reading poetry in a haze of cigarette smoke, with a small, secret measure of longing.

  She was surprised and a little nonplussed to walk into her honors lit seminar on the first day of the second semester and find a half-dozen Baggers in the classroom, along with the serious, neatly dressed, eager-to-please students like herself. The professor regarded the way the students had divided themselves on the two sides of the room with an expression of wry amusement and made them pull their chairs into a circle.

  “There,” she said. “At least this way you have to look at one another.”

  There were just twelve of them, small classes being the greatest advantage of the honors program, Professor Berkovitz had explained to Jane when he recommended her for the seminar. He’d been impressed by her comments during the semester, he said. Her writing skills were excellent. She was clearly capable of a greater challenge.

  Back from semester break, she’d gone to the English section in the bookstore and found the shelf where the books for the class were listed: English 103 Honors. The sign alone had made her smile, and she’d taken the books from the shelf one by one and leafed through them feeling connected to the students who had used them before and left evidence of their thoughts and ideas in crabbed margin notes and highlighted passages. She felt proud to have been recognized by her favorite professor, eager to begin the class, which she imagined would be like his class – but even better because everyone in it would care about what they were reading and think about it. Everyone would have something interesting and important to say. This new professor would sit on the edge of his desk, smoking while they talked, as Professor Berkowitz had, commenting now and then, directing the discussion to deeper, more satisfying levels that at the same time made students feel eager to learn, curious – and smarter than they really were.

  She hadn’t expected a woman, especially one like Professor Farlow. She was tall and stern, her long, dark hair streaked with silver. She was dressed in black, with a colorful, gypsy-like shawl draped over her shoulders; she wore a man’s gold watch on one wrist and, on the other, what must have been a dozen thin gold bracelets that jangled whenever she moved. She wore no makeup; her thin lips were colorless, her black eyes snapping with intelligence.

  “Well,” she said, with no introduction other than having written her name and office hours on the blackboard. “Let’s see what you know about Emily Dickinson.” She peered at her class list. “John Sargent?”

  A boy wearing a Sigma Nu pin sat straight up in his seat.

  “You are John Sargent?” Professor Farlow asked.

  He nodded.

  “Emily Dickinson?” she prodded.

  “Um. She wrote poems. She never got married,” he said.

  Professor Farlow nodded. “Caroline Swayzee?”

  “She always dressed in white,” a mousy girl responded. “She kept her poems in a dresser drawer and never showed them to anybody.”

  “She was a recluse,” Cathy Crowe, a bagger girl, said. “Kind of crazy.”

  Professor Farlow raised an eyebrow. “Jane Barth, can you add anything more – literary?”

  “Her rhymes –” Jane wracked her brain for the term her high school English teacher had used to describe them. “Well, they don’t rhyme exactly? They . . .”

  “Aha,” Professor Farlow said. “A piece of information about the poems of Emily Dickinson. As opposed to the myth of Emily Dickinson. Words on the page. That is what we’ll be considering for the next eighteen weeks together. Words on the page – and their power.” She glanced at Jane. “Slant rhyme, Miss Barth. That is the term you were searching for.”

  Pens scratched as students wrote it on the first page of their new notebooks.

  “As in ‘Tell the truth and tell it slant,’ ” Professor Farlow went on. “Which is the poem we will be considering this afternoon. Page 248 of your text. An excellent introduction to Miss Dickinson’s poetry, as you will see.”

  There was the sound of pages rustling, then quiet, and all eyes were on Professor Farlow, who recited the poem from memory.

  She repeated it. “Now look at the words,” she said. “What is Miss Dickinson saying here?”

  “Lie,” said one of the Baggers. Then muttered, “Which is such a load of crap.”

  Jane was shocked by his response, but Professor Farlow smiled. “In a sense, that is exactly what Miss Dickinson advises. But Mr. –” She glanced at her class list, then splayed her hands, inviting the boy to say his name.

  “Dugan,” he said, blushing. “Wayne Dugan.”

  “Mr. Dugan, then. If you will look a little more closely at the first two lines, I think you’ll see that’s not quite it.” She leaned forward, holding his gaze in hers, and repeated, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – /Success in Circuit lies.’ What do the lines actually say?”

  “Try to fake people out,” he said. “Which is also a load of crap.”

  “Good. Miss Dickinson does, indeed, advise us to fake people out in the service of the truth. ‘A load of crap,’ however. Where, in the text, does Miss Dickinson tell us that?”

  Several students snickered, and Jane had to bite her lips to keep them from curving into a smile. But she was riveted by the scene unfolding. Wayne Dugan glared at the professor, who gazed back at him with a calm, curious expression.

  “She uses all that fancy, flowery language to tell you to lie,” he said. “Which I think is a load of crap.”

  “Ah. You think.” Professor Farlow said.

  “Yeah. I think.”

  Professor Farlow waited.

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t think?” he asked. “Or maybe you think I should think what you think?’

  “Certainly not!” Professor Farlow said. “I am only asking you to connect what you think to the words on the page. The text. I am asking you to explain how you got from Miss Dickinson’s advice to fake people out in the service of the truth to –”

  “All lying’s crap,” he said. “Look at what they’re telling us about Vietnam, for example. Lies. They’re telling them slant, all right. So I’m supposed to agree with Miss Dickinson that that makes it okay?”

  Patiently, Professor Farlow directed him back to the subject at hand. “All lying’s crap. Where, in the poem, do you see that?”

  Wayne blushed brick red.

  “In the poem,” Professor Farlow repeated.

  “It’s not in the poem,” Wayne said.

  “Bravo!” She beamed at him with genuine delight. “Yes! You’re absolutely right, Mr. Dugan, and in seeing this you have brought us face-to-face with the most crucial aspect of our work this semester: to learn the difference between what’s on the page and what we think about what’s on the page.”

  She turned away from him, addressed the class. “It isn’t easy,” she said. “But if you can kee
p these two things separated, if you can enter into the discourse of literature with an open, curious mind, I assure you that what you think about anything, everything will be greatly enriched and all the world will be better for it.

  “I commend you for challenging me, Mr. Dugan,” she concluded. “I hope all of you will follow this example, testing the limits of your knowledge and understanding during our time together.” She took a sheaf of papers from a battered leather bag and set them on her desk. “That is all for today,” she said. “Quite enough for you to think about! You may pick up a copy of the syllabus on your way out. Be prepared to discuss the Dickinson poems listed next time we meet.” She gave them a dazzling smile, slung the bag over her shoulder, and was gone.

  “Whoa,” the Sigma Nu said. “I’m out of here. She’s crazy.”

  “Me, too,” said the Bagger girl, Cathy. “I don’t need this shit, you know?”

  “I like her,” Wayne Dugan said. “She’s not boring. And the literary Miss Barth?” He grinned at Jane, a friendly grin that made her grin back in spite of herself. “What about you?”

  She shrugged, half-attracted to him, half-repulsed by him. He was short and skinny, with wildly curly black hair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and ragged jeans. His green Army bag was stuffed with books and political tracts.

  As the weeks went by, he often caught up with her after class and walked as far as Jordan Hall, where she turned off to go back to the dorm. He’d taken Professor Farlow’s words to heart that first day and tenaciously pursued the precise meaning of every text they considered, as if it were a game. But he wouldn’t stop there. “What this makes me think is . . .” he’d say, and connect Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Faulkner with what was happening in his own life. In the world. Now.

  “So what do you think?” he’d ask, walking along beside her. “You’re always so quiet in class.”

  Jane was afraid of him, afraid of thinking the way he thought – though she often found herself pondering the intense discussions that he and a few others had with Professor Farlow in class for days afterwards. Writing the required papers for the class, her mind opened and produced ideas on the page that surprised her – and more than once had prompted Professor Farlow to write “Nice insight” in the margin with her red pen.

  “Come on, Barth,” Wayne had said after the class discussion on All Quiet on the Western Front, which had degenerated into a shouting match between Wayne and one of the fraternity guys about the stupidity of war and, from there, the particular stupidity of the war cranking up in Vietnam. “Admit it. You cannot read that book and not think about what’s going on there.”

  She was too embarrassed to admit that the book hadn’t made her think of Vietnam until it came up in class, because Vietnam just wasn’t something she thought much about. The war was about stopping Communism, she knew that. Some people thought it was wrong to be there, but she didn’t know exactly why.

  In fact, what All Quiet on the Western Front had made her think about was World War II.

  In her high school history class, she had learned about the rise of Hitler, about Pearl Harbor. Her teacher had been a bomber pilot, stationed in England, and told stories of the brave men he had known and the missions they flew. They’d studied diagrams of the D-Day Invasion, the Battle of the Bulge, battles her own father had fought in but would never discuss.

  But until she read All Quiet on the Western Front, she could not imagine what war – any war – was actually like. Nor had she realized that thinking as if inside another person’s head could so drastically change your own point of view. Reading, she became the young German soldier. At the end of his story, herself again, she wept for him. For the stupidity of war, regardless of what side you were on.

  Was this what had happened to her father, she wondered? Is this what he knew? Why, years later, he lay on the couch each night, anaesthetized? Why he woke at midnight and drove to the Red Star Tavern where others like him gathered to keep from remembering?

  The book had disturbed her profoundly, but she did not know how to talk to Wayne or anybody else about it. The next time the Baggers gathered in Dunn Meadow to demonstrate against the Vietnam War she paid attention, though. There were maybe a hundred of them gathered around a makeshift platform, shouting, “Get out now!” Their fists raised, their picket signs bobbing up and down. It was an unseasonably warm day in March, the Moody Blues pouring out of an open window on the second story of the Sigma Chi house, drowning out the words of the ex-Marine who’d taken the podium. She and Bridget sat on the steps, watching Tom and Pete and some others heckle the demonstrators. The boys were laughing, a little drunk already – the demonstration no more than the beginning of Saturday night. They’d filled their beer mugs from the keg hidden in the phone room and they were dancing, half to the rhythm of the music, half to their own obscenities. Before long, they were talking about calling up the Delts and starting an impromptu football game in the midst of the demonstration. Or just going over and cracking some heads.

  Across the street, someone fiddled with the microphone and the Marine’s words were momentarily clear. “Look at what we’re doing in Vietnam,” he said.

  When he finished speaking and stepped down, Jane saw that his right arm was gone, the empty sleeve of his uniform shirt pinned neatly over the stump. The Baggers clapped and whistled. Some took up the chant again, “Get out! Get out!”

  “Get fucked,” Pete yelled.

  Bridget laughed, along with the boys.

  “What?” she said, when Jane stood suddenly.

  But Jane didn’t answer. She was watching Wayne Dugan emerge and move toward the platform, fist raised. In class, he had said it was patriotic to dissent. You were obligated to dissent, if you cared about your country and believed it was doing something wrong. It was right there in the Declaration of Independence. He’d read the passage aloud to them.

  Now he and some others began to unfurl a large American flag, but the wind caught an end of it, which dipped and dragged along the muddy ground as they struggled to regain control, and this set Tom and Pete moving toward them. A half-dozen of their fraternity brothers followed, a small army of navy blue London Fog jackets, and from the upstairs windows another dozen hollered their support.

  The crowd parted to absorb them, then scattered when Pete punched one of the Baggers holding the flag. There was a loud squawk as the microphone toppled over on the platform, then the voice of a campus policeman telling the demonstrators to disperse. In the meadow, the Sigma Chis squared off with the Baggers who remained, Wayne Dugan among them.

  Watching them, Jane felt exactly the way she’d felt the day Tom borrowed Pete’s motorcycle and took her for a ride, driving so fast that when she looked down, the white staccato lines along the center of the asphalt became one long blur. She held onto him so tightly her arms ached. He glanced back, grinning, and the bike wobbled, righted. Whaaa. A car horn bleated, fading as Tom careened around, outdistanced it. She had been furious, thrilled, and scared to death – all in a mix.

  She thought, go inside. Don’t look. But, rooted to the spot, she watched Tom struggle with Wayne, each of them trying to claim the flag. Tom stepped back for an instant, catching Wayne off-guard, and decked him. Then, as Wayne reeled backward, Tom grabbed the flag, and he and Pete carried it aloft across the street. They ran past the girls, up the steps, into the house. Bridget followed them.

  Jane sat outside by herself a while, not sure what she should do. When the sun went down and she felt chilled, she went inside, up the side stairs to Tom’s room, where she was not supposed to be. The others had left and he was sitting on his bed, a can of beer in one hand.

  He grinned and opened his arms to her. “Jane! Where were you? Man, could you believe that fiasco with the flag? Those asshole Baggers.”

  She said, “Don’t you think they have a right to say what they believe?”

  She had to say it twice before it dawned on him that she was serious.

  “Are you kidding?”
he asked. “Did you see them? Dragging the flag around in the goddamn mud? Okay, maybe things got a little out of hand, but –”

  “Out of hand,” she said. “You beat the shit out of that one guy. You hurt him.”

  “Guys fight,” he said. “Come on. Have a beer, calm down. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “I don’t want a beer,” she said.

  Tom stood up, set the can of beer on the table. “What’s with you, Jane? What’s this sudden deep concern about the Baggers, anyway?”

  “I’m not concerned about the Baggers,” she said. “I just think –”

  “What? You think what?” He yanked the flag from the window behind him and threw it at her feet. “If you’re so worried about their goddamn flag, why don’t you just go take it back to them?”

  They glared at each other, then at the flag, which lay in a crumpled heap between them.

  Finally, because she didn’t know what else to do, she gathered up it up and rushed from the room, down the stairs, out the door. She would not cry. Not until there was no chance anyone could see her.

  By now it was dusk, the campus deserted. It felt like winter again, puddles the sun had made icing up at the edges. A light rain began to fall and she shivered in her light jacket. She felt stupid carrying the flag, angry with Wayne Dugan for getting her into this predicament in the first place. He was always so sure he was right – about everything. She crossed the street, glanced to make sure nobody was looking, then left it balled up on a bench at the edge of Dunn Meadow.

  Once in her room, she locked the door behind her. She did not turn on the light. She sat on her bed, her back against the wall, her legs stuck straight out, determined to concentrate on the silver slant of rain framed by the window. But she could not stop thinking about what had happened in Tom’s room.